Meet the New Boss/Same as the Old Boss

That's what the band the Who was singing in the early 70s if I recall correctly. I will admit that I was a big advocate for Obama as I was looking for a change. Unfortunately Roger Daltreys lyrics are holding true today. In the next few blogs I will try to show how Obama for the most part has kept the status quo in Washington, but for today I will just be talking about Afghanistan. It is starting to leak out that Obama will be escalating the troop level in Afghanistan and the big announcement should be on Tuesday during a prime time speech. I know he said he would resolve the conflict during his campaigning, but liberals, as he was labeled, are supposed do do it through diplomacy, rebuilding infrastructure and aid. Why do you think the Taliban has regained such a presence there. Its because they are providing basics such as schools, hospitals, and money to buy goods and services. What we do is come in with weapons, occupying their country and telling them how they should lives without giving them any reason not to hate us. Think about it if you had them occupying our country in the way we are doing it to theirs we would have obliterated every last one of them. Some say were there for national security. This is horseshit. The 9/11 attacks were planned from Germany and the terrorists trained in our own country. Afghanistan is simply too remote to do anything but harbor them. Most educated people learn from their mistakes. Apparently Obama has not learned from the mistakes made there over the last oh 800 years or so. These people do not take kindly to outsiders. Genghis Khan ruled all of central Asia but could not break the will of the Afghan people. It was the only area in that part of the world he could not conquer. In the 1700s it was the one area the British could not colonize in that part of the world. And in the 1900s the Soviet Union conquered all of Clusterfuckistan except for you got it, Afghanistan. In fact the Soviets went broke during their 10 year occupation and it contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union. Which brings me to this question. With the debt we have piled up, where are we going to get the money to pay for this escalation? June's bill was the latest figure and the U.S. spent 6.7 billion dollars, and that was before the escalation. Most estimates say it costs the taxpayer about a million a year for just one soldier in a war. That adds up to around 88 billion a year. Once again who is going to pay for this? I have a better idea. Since the average income in Afghanistan is only 760 dollars per year, why don't we just give them that money. It would add up to about 3600 dollars per person based on their population. We would leave, they would like us because we are leaving, and they would have the money in their economy to to do what is needed. Better yet why don't we just bring our troops home to protect our borders and spend that money in this country getting unemployment back below 10 percent. Just a thought.

What is wrong with government

I find it hard to believe that anyone takes Representative Michele Bachmann (R. Minnesota) seriously. At yesterdays impromptu rally on the Capitol steps that she organized with the help of Fox news, she was heard calling for a revolution and to scare members of congress into voting no on health care reform. So someone at the rally hoisted a large banner that showed bodies of holocaust victims, with the saying that this is socialistic health care. Meanwhile House minority leader John Boehner (R. Ohio) holds up his copy of the constitution and recites a passage from the preamble. He recites something about how all men are created equal with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The only problem with this is that its not the constitution he's reciting, its the Declaration of Independence. Now I don't expect the average Joe to know this, but one of the leaders of our country should. Idiots like him should just check out and go back to private life. Then I hear Carly Fiorina is trying to unseat Barbara Boxer (D. California) from her Senate seat next year. This is the same Carly Fiorina that ran Hewlett Packard. The same Carly Fiorina that layed off thousands of workers at HP while at the same time lobbied the Bush administration to let in more people in from foreign countries to work for HP. I guess she realized an engineer from India will work for around 30 thousand a year, while an engineer from this country makes about three times as much. Not only does she endorse shipping jobs overseas, she wants to replace the ones that are still here with low cost labor. So much for being patriotic. All this in a time where the average CEO pay has gone from around forty times that of an hourly worker to over four hundred times. Didn't she get fired from HP? Yes, and she left with a 20 million dollar severance package. If I get fired I wont get that, nor do I deserve that, and neither does anyone else. If your getting fired, it's because you have not done your job. Oh I forgot, people at that level don't get fired they resign to pursue other interests. Getting back on track, it is ironic that when the majority of this country wanted the Bush administration to pull out of Iraq his buddy Dick Cheney said he didn't care what the people want. Now the majority of people in this country want health care and Republicans are doing everything to stop it. Aren't our elected officials supposed to be representing us and what we want. Every poll taken with the exception of the Fox News poll shows that at least 63 percent of Americans want health care. Its time for our Representatives to start representing the people and not big business.

Are you for gang rape?

Well I am back from vacation and thought it was about time to start blogging again. With the usual health care debate getting old I came across a story about an amendment, Senator Al Franken introduced to the Senate. In 2005 Jamie Leigh Jones was brutally gang raped by her KBR coworkers while in Iraq. She was locked in a shipping container for more than 24 hours to prevent her from reporting it. If you don't know who KBR is, its a division of Halliburton that was relocated offshore to avoid paying federal taxes after being given a no bid contract for services in Iraq by the Bush administration. That's right our tax dollars pay KBR and they avoid paying taxes back to the government, as in our government. But that's an entirely different story. Anyways Senator Al Franken introduced an amendment that would deny defense contracts to any company that required their employees to sign away their right to sue their employer. Iraq being outside U.S. jurisdiction and a signed letter saying she could not sue KBR has left Jamie Leigh Jones with no recourse against her attackers. Thirty Republican Senators voted against the amendment. These senators included John McCain, Saxby Chambliss, Sam Brownback, and John Ensign who is in hot water for payoffs to cover up a sex scandal of his own. I wonder how they would have voted if it was their own daughter who was raped? On a side note these same senators all voted to stop funding ACORN. This is a blatant example of partisan politics and shows the republicans are not thinking clearly at this point.

Health Care and Obama

I find it interesting that in a Wall Street Journal (Read: Rich Mans Paper) poll last week 63 percent of Americans want a public option and another 10 percent want a single payer plan. That's 73 percent of people polled are in favor of government run health care. This is a response by people who read the Wall Street Journal. I wonder what the percentages would be by a cross section of America. So my question is why is congress not following what the people they are supposed to be representing want? Could it be that the people of this country no longer have a say so in government because big business has bought their way into which laws get passed. Laws that favor big business instead of favoring the people of this country. Its a shame that this is what our country has become. Look at the collapse of the financial system. We the people bailed out Wall Street and a year later no regulations have passed either house. Wall Street is venturing heavily into risky derivatives again and giving themselves huge bonuses doing it. If Wall Street wants to do that with their own money then let them. The problem is they are betting with our money so they have nothing to lose. If someone gave you 10,000 dollars to place on red or black on a roulette wheel, you would have no problem doing it but would you do that with your own money? So getting back to health care, the preamble of our constitution states "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare". I take that as "we" being the government, in the form of our Representatives in D.C. should be promoting the general welfare by passing a national health care bill. I know that maybe a stretch but is owning an Ar-15 assault rifle the same as the second amendment which states "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed". Think about it, it works both ways. By the way I am pro gun and have an Illinois Firearms Owners Identification Card. This was just a good analogy showing that it works both ways.

Well Chicago did not get the Olympics. There are many reasons we didn't. Such as the fact that our politics are hated around the world, which sucks because we give more in aid than anyone around the world to countries in need. Could it be the bribery scandal that reeked in Salt Lake getting the winter Olympics and bringing the IOC Chairman into our court system and making him look like an idiot. Could it be that South America has never had the Olympics there. I can tell you firsthand that Rio de Janiero is an awesome city, although they will definitely have to work on their transportation system. Whatever the reason, contrary to Rush Limbaugh, it was not Obama's fault that we didn't get awarded the games. I do think its interesting that for how patriotic the republicans claim to be, that they did not support Obama going over to Copenhagen to lobby for our country, and instead critisized him. My hats off to Senator Lindsey Graham for going out on a limb and saying to the fringe right wingers (Including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck) that Obama is a citizen, born in Hawaii, is not a Muslim and is a good man. When the people at his town halls started telling him these lies he diplomatically called them crazy. He went on to say it's time for the republican party to start policing their own ranks. I don't agree with most of his politics but I do hold him in high regard in that he has served a tour in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Unlike our former president who ditched his National Guard unit here in the states.

Health Care Costs for Those of us that have it

I got my enrollment packet in the mail yesterday and was surprised at the changes and the cost increase. If I am reading this right I will be paying an extra 27 dollars a paycheck and my coverage will be decreasing in benefits some drastically high. A few of years ago my wife severely broke her ankle. The tab came to around 45,000 dollars. The HMO I have paid everything except a 250 dollar deductible. I call that great insurance. Jump ahead four years to the present day and with the same scenario I would be paying about seven thousand dollars out of pocket. This is why seventy percent of the personal bankruptcies in the United States are do to health care and and half of those are people who had insurance and could not afford the deductible or went over there maximum allowed benefits. Oh and my insurance no longer calls it a deductible, they now call it co-insurance. I guess that's to make me feel better about it. Anyways on the news tonight they showed that the average a company will pay in premiums for each employee is 9120 dollars. And that's on top of an employee contribution of 2100 dollars a year. Plus an employee will pay on top of that 1900 per year in co pays or deductibles. My question is why would business's be against a national health care? It would drastically reduce the cost to the business in order to compete in a global economy where we are the only country in the modernized world that does not have a national health care system. Those figures are for me and my wife. If we were to have children the cost goes up even more. Its time to cut out the middle man (The insurance companies) from doing nothing useful except enriching themselves on other peoples suffering.

I just want to make it clear. I am not in favor of Max Baucuses health plan or President Obamas health plan. What does it say when the Baucus health plan is not liberal enough for Olympia Snowe, a republican. She is a moderate republican, but a republican none the less. Even she won't sign on because there are not enough subsidies for poor people. Maybe it says he (Baucus) has received over three million dollars from the health insurance and pharmaceutical lobby. Why do you think they are backing his bill? The only way to go is a single payer health plan. Medicare for everyone. Right now medicare (the health insurance you get when you reach 65 years old, ran by the government) only has high cost patients enrolled in it and that's why its going broke. On the other hand the health insurance industry has seen record profits year after year with our out of pocket costs skyrocketing. Its no wonder, if medicare picks and chooses to only insure healthy people the way the for profit insurance companies do, they would not be in the financial trouble their in. They would be making a profit themselves. The cost for insurance companies to review claims so they can deny them, along with looking for any little discrepancy so they can drop you when you find out you need them for a catastrophic illness is over 350 billion dollars a year. That money could pay for everyone in this country to have health insurance at no additional cost to the taxpayer. This is not socialized health care. The V.A. is socialized health care. The government employees the doctors and nurses and owns the hospitals. A single payer plan would not. The profit should go to health care workers not the insurance industry. A single payer system is medicare for everyone. You go to whichever doctor you choose. This is the only solution to solve three very important problems. 1. It eliminates the possibility of medicare going broke, because now they are taking in money from healthy young people who on average use very little of the benefits as well as older people, many of which need constant medical care. 2. The overhead that is now spent on administrative costs would pay for the program. Estimates say that it would cost around two hundred dollars a month for a family of four. That money can be given to you by your employer to pay for it. This eliminates the higher costs your employer pays to private for profit health insurance companies. 3. It allows companies a lower cost structure to compete on an even playing field in a global economy. But noooo, congress and the President will have none of that. They just want to feed us a bill that will cost the taxpayers a ton of money, ensure the insurance companies continue with record profits, and keep many people uninsured. Once again the democrats are wimping out. You could give the republicans everything they want and they still won't sign on when it comes to a vote. They know they are feeding the democrats shit and when it fails they can say "See we told you it wasn't going to work" and blame the democrats for a crappy bill that they were against. Democrats in D.C. must wake up and grow a set for a change.

A couple of interesting items I came across today. It seems President Bush was not to keen on Sarah Palin himself. A new book coming out that was written by former Bush speech writer Matt Latimer claims that Bush said McCain's choice was dubious at best and that "This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for. She hasn't spent one day on the national level. Let's wait and see how she looks five days out." I am not sure this is true as I always wondered if Bush even new what the word dubious meant or even pronounce it. Am I bashing Bush? In the words of Sarah Palin, you betcha! Five days out she had been exposed to the public through the media showing how simple she was and frankly she sounded like a total idiot. The comedians were having a field day with her. It is ironic though that even Bush could see that she was not ready for what she was put into. All you republicans take note of what your fearless leader has said. In the second thing I came across was about Joe (You Lie) Wilson of South Carolina. The day after his outburst at Obama's address to congress in his press conference he stated that he was for legal immigration and stated he was an immigration attorney. The problem with that is there is no record of him working on any immigration case or any record of an immigration case with his real name Addison Wilson. Joe Wilson I have just one thing to say to you. You lie!

09/12 March on Washington D.C. - What a JOKE!

I came across a few pictures of Saturdays march in Washington D.C. By the republicans, teabaggers, birthers, and deathers. Now I know that my republican friends are not like this but for me it's embarrassing that I was ever affiliated with this party. As the pictures show this is nothing but a bunch of sore losers (Get over it Obama won) showing subdued racism and I just can't believe that in 2009 this is what our countries become. And to the birthers who now have come up with a second Obama birth certificate, you keep forgetting the most important thing, Kenya was not a country in 1961 the year Obama was born so stop making Kenyan birth certificates.

You lie. That's what Republican Representative Joe Wilson from South Carolina yelled at President Obama on Wednesday nights address to congress. You lie. It seems to me when G.W. Bush spoke to congress the democrats did not show that kind of disrespect. Yeah when he showed up there were some boos but once his speeches to the joint session of congress started the democrats remained quiet. You lie, is what the democrats could have said but they didn't. What I would like to know is where was Joe Wilson the last eight years before Obama took office? Because if there was ever a need to shout you lie, it was during the Bush presidency. For example Bush lied to the country about Iraq being tied to Al Qaeda, he lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and he lied about Iraq's mobile weapons labs. And because of these lies, over four thousand US soldiers have given their lives in Iraq. Where was Joe Wilson then. The real issue is, he shouted you lie about the health care issue. Specifically the issue of insuring illegal aliens. HR3200 S246 (Health care reform bill) specifically states that there will be no federal payment for undocumented aliens. A fact that even Fox News's Bill O'reilly agreed to telling Karl Rove that he was wrong along with Joe Wilson immediately following Obamas speech. If you are going to show up the president in front of the world, at least have your facts straight. I have mine straight and it's no wonder that with people as stupid as Joe Wilson shaping this countries future that the average American stands up and and shouts "I want government out of my medicare" at town hall meetings. People, don't take my word or Fox News's word or MSNBC's word. Get off your ass and do a little research. It would surprise you how much a little bit of knowledge stimulates your brain.

CNN's Sanchez responds to if Reagan had done it argument by pointing out that "Reagan did address children"

CNN's Sanchez responds to if Reagan had done it argument by pointing out that "Reagan did address children"

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Wow, now the talk is of Barack Obama talking to students the first day of class on the importance of getting an education and doing good in school. The republicans in charge are totally against this. Is it because they don't want the people this country educated, because if we are educated maybe we will be able to see the shit they have been selling for years now. Remember during the election educated people were called elitists by people who say they have foreign policy experience because they can see Russia. But that's right I can treat car crash victims and gunshot wounds because I watched the first four seasons of E.R. Oh wait, that's not it because people like John Boehner and Eric Cantor who frequently quote Ronald Reagan, who himself gave a speech in 1988 to students for the same thing. The importance of getting a good education. Oh and then he went of to answer a question by promoting his tax cuts. Hardly a non partisan issue. Let's reverse this and see what would happen if Obama were to include a suggestion of taxing rich people to pay for health care. I guarantee you a massive outcry by conservatives then. By the way watch the video of CNNs Rick Sanchez interviewing another uninformed citizen on Ronald Reagans School speech posted below on blog main page. Oh and lets talk about rich people, specifically the bank CEOs. After we the public bailed out their incompetence at being CEOs, to the tune of 283 billion dollars, the average salary for the twenty largest banks CEOs for 2008 was almost 13.8 million dollars each, while the average person who bailed them out was around 31,500 dollars. And yes its the usual suspects Citi, B of A, JP Morgan, AIG, Wells Fargo. By the way when questioned, the bank CEOs complained that they took a pay cut. Talk about irony!

Healthcare 2
Well who is going to pay for healthcare is the question. I will tell you who, we are. We allready are. Some of your own health care insurance pays for the uninsured who walk into an emergency room, as does some of your homeowners insurance, as does some of your auto insurance. And how many of you fork over three to five dollars a day for Starbucks where around twenty percent of that pays for Starbucks employees health care. I haven't even mentioned the half a billion dollars that the health care insurance industry has spent lobbying congress not to pass health care reform. That could insure a lot of uninsured people. Why is it that we spend twice the amount per person on health care than every other westernized country yet were thirty seventh in general health and fiftieth in life expectancy? Maybe because around one dollar out of every seven hundred dollars spent on health care in this country goes to the compenstion package for United Health Cares C.E.O. Is that what were all about now, getting rich off of other peoples sickness by denying them treatment. Make no mistake health care is a right. It is not a privelage and anyone who does not see it that way ought to take a look at themselves and ask if it is a right if god forbid your house was burning down that the fire department come and save your house, or if burgalars were breaking in that the police come to protect you. Those are rights, you have as a citizen not priveledges to only the the people who can afford them. Don't look now but the police and fire departments ar socialist programs, as are libraries, and primary public schools. They are non profit and work well in most instances. The problem is over my lifetime the government and the media has led us to believe that socialism and communism are one and the same and they're not. I would prefer the government stay out of everything except protecting our national security but thats not going to happen because of who is in charge, be it democrats or republicans and if they made government smaller they would be cutting off their own heads. So lets do this right. There are just some things that should not be profited on and peoples misery when they're sick should not be turning C.E.O.s into billionaires.

Health Care

All this talk about health care, either for or against.
But it is ironic the morons at the town halls shouting at congressmen/women I want government out of my medicare. Who do you think provides medicare? Or the female at Congressman Barney Franks town hall asking him how he can support President Obama's Nazi policies. Let's consider how ironic it is for someone to ask a gay Jew how he can support a black presidents Nazi policies. If you don't see the irony here maybe you didn't pay attention in seventh grade history or maybe you just didn't get past seventh grade. Either way you need to pay attention and educate yourself on the issues.